


Still Life

by randomalia (spilinski)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Insecurity, M/M, Season/Series 02, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 11:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4219260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spilinski/pseuds/randomalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterwards, Bobby was good enough to let them stay a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Life

**Author's Note:**

> Season 2, set between Everyone Loves a Clown and Bloodlust.

Afterwards, Bobby was good enough to let them stay a while. Dean just wanted to get the car fixed, and what Sam wanted he couldn't say, so he slept and woke and washed his face without looking in the mirror, stood by while Dean worked. The days went on with only the numbers Sam gave them.

There were times he'd watch Bobby in the kitchen; when he cooked he'd sometimes hum a little tune, nothing Sam could recognise but familiar all the same. The pan would be spitting oil and the bacon popping, slightly stale bread piled up on a plate nearby and carefully placed out of the sunlight burning through the window above the cooker. Bobby didn't talk much. He looked grave and sometimes distant; he kept most of his thoughts to himself and although his presence had a weight of knowledge and years, he never seemed to fill or anchor the room he stood in. In the evenings he and Sam would sit and eat together, after Sam had taken a plate out to Dean in the yard, and they spoke a little about cars and books. Bobby collected both, of the kind that other people were done with. Pieces of cars and pages of symbols, lists of yew bark and iron filings, hair of the dog and the rusting shell of a T-bird lying still and neglected.

Bobby made piles instead of notes. He gathered things around him in hulking masses like an asteroid belt fallen to earth, and he'd probably lived on this stretch of road for going past a decade. Whatever his life had been before wasn't for anyone to know about.

Sam missed his dad a lot, but the feel of it was sharper when Bobby was around. All Sam could do was notice the ways they were different.

*

He wandered around the junkyard from time to time, looking at scraps and the empty dog bowls left by the back step. When the wind picked up it blew dry and gritty across the surface of the bare ground and tunnelled forcefully between metal and broken windows. One of the wrecks had a loose hinge and sometimes the door swung and creaked slowly like a high flag or an old, bowing tree.

Dean was to be found with the Impala, off to the left, out in the middle. Sam usually kept his distance. Never offered to help with the rebuilding after the first time, because Dean didn't want him there.

One afternoon the sun was coming down harsh and hot, making him lazy, and he wandered close enough to sit and lean against another car's tire, the warm metal pressing to his shoulder. He picked at the dusty ground and listened to Dean shifting, picking up tools and not saying a word; he was under the body of the car, beyond his boots barely visible. Up above, Sam could see a tear along the material of the back seat that had been there a long time. Ripped white lines sticking out, the soft foam underneath. Little town, he thought. Demon in the factory, and blood rituals at dawn.

Most of the damage was from the truck, but there was a violent hole in the trunk that was new.

*

Bobby didn't keep a fire. He once said it was asking for trouble, but he was talking about getting smoke in the house and scorching on the hearth. And anyway, he preferred whiskey as a way of keeping warm.

The temperature only dropped in the early hours, two, three, four o'clock. Sam usually stayed in bed, waiting for sleep, but Dean sat up some nights working at the table and probably got cold.

Sam was always watching Dean now. Had been since the hospital.

Three-thirty on a Tuesday, far-off owls the only sound in the air outside. Dean with his head bent over an old sheet on the table, silver and dark grease between his hands, bare feet, bare arms. Weariness in the curve of his spine.

*

Without Dad, things started to feel blown wide-open. When it was Jess he had family to go to, and going home had been the right thing, the only and inevitable thing. It was stupid, but lying in the messy spare room Sam found himself thinking of those balloons that got cut free and left to drift up into nothing, too light. Too awfully light.

*

Before they built the pyre, Sam had carefully lifted off Dad's dog tags. First time they'd come off since 1972, as far as Sam knew. When he and Dean were little Dad used to explain the tags _stay with you til you're dead, that's their job_. They were thin and cold in Sam's hand.

Before, Sam had tried to talk to Dad, just in case he was still around, listening. There wasn't much time, or enough time. When Dean left him alone Sam stared at the empty sky; his eyes burned; couldn't get _sorry_ through his throat.

They cut saplings for the base. Stripped off the leaves. Left the green wood behind.

*

Sam checked through the stacks of books, wiped the dishes, cleaned the weapons. His hands moved of their own accord and it was all familiar; he'd learned this young, responsibility and the golden tang of gun oil.

He remembered a café on Ramona, with bowls of peanuts on the table; you could shell the nuts and throw the casing straight onto the floor. Some employee with downcast eyes came by to sweep up the mess now and then. The kind of place that couldn't make up its mind: moussaka and burritos and battered fish, everything with optional fries, even the salad. One of their earlier dates.

Across from him, Jess had talked about an old clock she'd seen somewhere in Europe, specially designed with moving figurines and gothic decoration. Apparently, she said, after it was finished the clock maker's eyes had been put out so he could never make another one. Scarcity made things valuable, Sam knew this. It also made people greedy and desperate; they'd seen enough of it in the places they passed through, the jobs they worked. It was rarely about money and often about people, about one particular person.

It was a gloomy, heavy sort of daylight in what passed for the dining room at Bobby's. Sam sat opposite books, dark covers and thick insides, and made notes in Dad's journal wherever it seemed useful. Outside he could hear the flat ting, ting, ting of Dean hammering metal into shape.


End file.
